


Let It Be

by gelandspray



Series: Lay It All Down [6]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Trans, Trans Character, Trans Kurt, Trans Male Character, Transgender, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 00:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1798462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gelandspray/pseuds/gelandspray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Days after he tells Blaine the truth, Kurt still hasn't heard from him and Santana and Rachel want to know why Blaine hasn't been around as much. Problem is that once Kurt starts talking, it's hard for him to stop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let It Be

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt Fill: Comfort  
> For [Klaine Bingo](http://www.klainebingo.tumblr.com)

“Where’s gelmet tonight?” Santana asks in that way that makes Kurt feel like he should automatically be on the defense no matter how benign her words are so far.

They are sitting together on the couch, Santana texting at record speed and Kurt trying to read the latest Vogue, but he’s been reading the same page for twenty minutes. He tries to focus harder on the words and actually _read_ , but it’s taking _a lot_ of effort.

“I don’t know,” Kurt mumbles, avoiding engaging with Santana any further. He knows that when Santana gets started, she gets on a roll and won’t stop until she finds herself sufficiently clever.

“Figures, you finally have a guy but you’re still too vanilla to actually do anything on Friday night but watch Berry shave her mustache, while you delicately shape your pubic hair into a rainbow,” she continues with a laugh.

“Shut up, Santana,” Kurt barks.

“Whoa, don’t take your sexual frustration out on me, Gerber gums. I’m not the one who hasn’t managed to wiggle the way into some dork’s pants. You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard considering the cardigan obsession.”

“I’m not in the mood!” he shouts, wrenching his eyes away from the magazine finally to look at Santana, who is enviably fabulous and carefree.

He can’t deal with her right now. He can’t deal with having to defend himself and protect himself from whatever digs she comes up with. When the schedule showed that they all had the whole day off from work, he thought they could all spend time together – Mercedes, Sam, Artie, and Blaine, too. But that was last week and now he has nothing to do but sit around and try to fill his time somehow.

“You okay, Kurt?” Rachel asks as she marches in from her room to the living room. Rachel seems to march everywhere and usually that’s just a sign of her ambition and can thusly be accepted and ignored. But with his nerves running high and his irritation bubbling, the stomps just hurt.

“I just—I don’t know where Blaine is tonight,” Kurt dismisses, trying to return to his magazine and hope they buy it and leave it alone.

“Did you break up?” Rachel inquires. “Oh! Was he jealous of your talent? You know, Kurt, it really is a hazard of being a star; trust me, I should know. You remember how people got jealous all the time in Glee Club.”

Rachel casually, but not so casually because when is Rachel ever subtle, nods towards Santana.

“Hold on, bobby socks,” Santana fires back. “I _know_ you’re not suggesting that I might not want to hear your shrill little voice is because I was _jealous_. I’m just as talented as you and I needed to preserve my eardrums from your continuous _squawking_!”

Rachel holds up one hand in what might be a placating gesture but is mostly patronizing and says, in her usual calmly defensive tone, “Santana, this isn’t about your denial.”

“Denial!?” Santana shouts.

Rachel ignores it and barrels right on through in an example of a well-practiced habit. “This is about _Kurt_. What’s going on, Kurt?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“ _Kurt_ ,” Rachel scolds, dragging out his name to highlight that she doesn’t believe him one bit.

“Just don’t get your hopes up for Blaine coming back,” Kurt says simply.

“So, you did break up,” Rachel confirms, rather proud of herself though Kurt cannot fathom a reason why.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he confesses.

“How can you not be sure?” Santana demands. “It’s either ‘we’re over’ or ‘let’s go have sex like rabid gay bunnies at Easter.’”

“I’m not sure,” Kurt hisses, “because he said he’d call me but he hasn’t yet, so either he needs more time or he’s changed his mind and he won’t call at all.”

“Why don’t you call him and get it over with?” Santana advises. “At least that way you will know and I won’t have to deal with you being even bitchier than normal.”

Kurt sighs. “No, I should leave him alone.”

“Oh!” Rachel exclaims, clearly thinking she’s had a stroke of genius. “Why don’t we ask _Mercedes_ to ask _Sam_ how Blaine is doing?”

“I want to give Blaine his space. He deserves time to think.”

“Shit,” Santana scoffs. “What did you do? He was all over you.”

“Did you cheat?” Rachel interjected. “I have _great_ make up songs for cheating. I’ve been compiling them since that _incident_.”

“ _No!_ ” Kurt insists. “I am quite proud of my role as the only person in our generation of New Directions to have never cheated.”

“That’s because you never had anyone to cheat on,” Santana murmurs.

“Well, I didn’t cheat on Blaine,” Kurt declares sternly.

Rachel, apparently now committed enough to this conversation to stay, sits down next to him and asks, “Then, what _did_ you do?”

“I told him,” he states simply.

He doesn’t need to specify. They know what he’s talking about. There is only one topic Kurt would be alluding to like this.

“Then he’s an asshole for leaving you hanging like this,” Santana harrumphs.

“No, he’s not,” Kurt asserts. It’s important for them to know that.

“He can’t just dump you for something you can’t control!” Rachel shrieks.

“He can. People dump people for stuff they can’t control all the time. Besides, this isn’t just about me. It’s about him having to handle himself.”

“Wanky.”

“Santana!” Rachel admonishes. “What do you mean, Kurt?” 

“Santana knows just as well as I do that when you’re gay, you insist that you only like a specific type of people. You have to, because people try to tell you that you’ll learn or you’ll get over it. So, you remind people and, by extension, remind yourself that you only like that one type. Most cis people aren’t used to thinking about how you can like one type of person but that doesn’t set anything in stone about what their parts are. A straight person _certainly_ isn’t exempt from this; but a gay man spends so much time telling people he only likes men and will always only like men and people will call him a cocksucker and he might take that on and own it instead of let it hurt him; you know, take back the word and whatnot. But what happens when the man he’s with doesn’t have a cock? He starts to question the things he’s said and insisted for so long. He starts to question who he is. He starts to question what it means that this is such a big deal. Blaine is allowed to have time to adjust how he sees himself. Imagine, Santana, if you found out your girlfriend was a trans woman and you two had sex and you found that you really enjoyed her cock. Would you be able to _immediately_ and _without hesitation_ merge that with the rhetoric of a lesbian, where you’ve basically insisted that you’ll always only want someone with a vagina?”

“Hold up. I wouldn’t walk out on my girlfriend!” Santana declares.

“That’s good of you,” Kurt assents. “I don’t really believe it, but that’s good of you. I think you have the distance right now to _say_ you’d never let it effect you so much, but if it really happened, the reality might be different from how you imagine it. I don’t think many people will willingly admit how much it would matter to them like people won’t admit they’re racist or ableist or homophobic. You don’t want to be transphobic, so you say you wouldn’t care, but it’s hard to know until it happens. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes you inexperienced, uneducated. It means you’re a cis person living in a cissexist, cisnormative society. You have had the privilege of not having to think about this as much.”

A silence settles over the group, which is pretty much a first, and Kurt feels like his throat is tight and he can feel the prickle behind his eyes. Holding back tears is his absolute least favorite feeling, but he is very familiar with it.

Rachel is the one to break the tension by asking what Kurt expected them to ask from the start: “Have you called Unique?”

“No, it’s not like she’s my therapist or anything,” Kurt mumbles.

“No, but she’s your best friend,” Rachel reminds him, as if he would forget.

“Well, I don’t want to call her,” he snaps.

“Why? Did you fight?”

“No.”

“Then why not call her? She’ll understand way better than we do,” she reasons. 

“It’s just that when I call Unique, everything will be more real, _because_ she understands. I won’t be able to be as disconnected as I am right now because Unique will ask spot on questions that only people who have lived this can ask. I won’t need to educate her. She knows what it’s like to try _so hard_ for _so long_ to look the part, so when you meet someone and they are interested in you and they see you the way you’ve wanted to be seen for so long, you just want to _keep it that way_ ,” Kurt sobs, feeling the tears trickle down his face as he buries his face in his hands, squeezing his eyes closed, hunching his shoulders and curling in on himself as best as he can. “You want to live in that little world where you’re with someone who sees you as a man without question and who likes the man he sees. To Blaine, I was always Kurt The Man without hesitation or stumble or confused pronouns. Now, it won’t be so easy. So, no, I don’t want to call Unique and have to talk about it, because I’ve just said is just the surface layer of all this _shit_.”

“Kurt-“ Rachel starts. He can hear Rachel’s frantic tone and he knows Rachel has never seen him this worked up, but he can’t stop himself now. This is part of what he was afraid of, that once he started really thinking about everything he wouldn’t be able to stop. Once the bottle was opened, everything would shoot out and it couldn’t be closed again, just spilling and spilling until everything is used up.

“It just would have been _so nice_ to be called someone’s _boy_ friend. To hear the words come from Blaine’s lips and in Blaine’s voice and have him believe one hundred percent that there’s no other possible word to use. But I knew I couldn’t wait that long. I knew it would be worse for both of us to get in that deep with the truth still hidden. There’s a chance that he’ll still forgive me now and I hope he does, because I really thought that this relationship could go somewhere; that he could be my boyfriend and I could be his. Maybe for a long, long time.”

Kurt falls back into another round of sobs and is both relived and anguished. Kurt finds crying really cathartic, but he also hates this spiraling loss of control. He hates the rough feeling of pulling air into lungs that feel like they’re quivering and shaking. He hates feeling so out in the open like this. He just wants to crawl into bed, pull the blankets up to his chin, and curl in on himself for a while.

He feels a pair of arms wrapping around him and he tries to shrug them off. He doesn’t want Rachel’s careful pitying. He already feels enough like shit. But the arms won’t go away; they just hold tighter.

Then he realizes that these arms are too thick to be Rachel’s and he opens his eyes.

 _Blaine_.

The thoughts rush out of him and the words catch in his throat. Where streams of confessions easily fell from his tongue only a minute ago, there is now only a tongue that feels useless and bumbling. His words are stuck.  

“D-did you call him?” he chokes out, looking frantically between Rachel, Santana, and Blaine. He tries to push away from Blaine some more. Blaine shouldn’t be guilted into comforting him. He shouldn’t come back because Rachel or Santana told him to. “You didn’t have to c-come. I’m sorry.”

“Shh, nobody called me,” Blaine sooths, rubbing his hand up and down Kurt’s arm. “I actually called you a couple hours ago.”

“My phone is in my room.”

“Well, since you didn’t answer, I decided to just come over and see you,” he explains with a small smile gracing his lips.

“You’re lying,” Kurt insists rather pathetically.

“Kurt, let’s go to your room,” Blaine requests. “We can talk.”

“Oh, no, Santana and I actually have some…things to do,” Rachel declares, “So, you guys can stay right there. No problem.” She nods jerkily at Santana a few times before Santana rolls her eyes and gets up. “Alright, so, uh, we will just see you later, then.”

Blaine releases a single chuckle as Rachel and Santana slip out the door, with Rachel waving enthusiastically and Santana begrudgingly following her. Then Blaine turns comfortingly serious again, which is a special Blaine talent. “I’m sorry I took so long to call.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not. I shouldn’t have waited so long,” Blaine apologetically argues.

“Y-you can take as long as you need,” Kurt maintains, sniffing and urgently rubbing the traitorous tears away.

“I don’t need any more time.”

“Ok-kay. I appreciate you letting me know,” Kurt states, before pushing a little again, trying to get his distance back, trying to put the lid back on and do a better job sealing it up this time.

“What? Kurt,” Blaine objects, “I didn’t come here to break up with you.”

Kurt sits stock-still and looks anywhere but Blaine. That is, until Blaine takes Kurt’s face in both his beautiful, strong hands and delicately turns Kurt to look him in the eye. And then, when Kurt holds eye contact, Blaine drops his hands down to take both of Kurt’s hands and hold them tightly.

“Kurt Hummel, would you do me the honor of being my boyfriend?”

The word sounds even more beautiful coming from Blaine’s lips and in Blaine’s voice than he thought it would. But…

“You’re kidding. You feel bad that I’m crying so you want to make me feel better, which is nice of you but very unnecessarily and actually pretty insulting, so please don’t.”

“Kurt, I’m not pitying you or trying to throw you a bone by asking you to be my boyfriend. If I were, I’d just give you a cheesecake,” he jokes flatly. “You’d be doing _me_ a favor. You are the _best man_ I’ve ever met and it would be my privilege to be your boyfriend.” 

“Always the proper gentleman,” Kurt laughs thickly.

“Please, Kurt. Trust me. Trust how _amazing_ you are,” Blaine pleads.

“Fine,” he agrees, feeling his cheeks burning.

“Yeah?” Blaine asks, lighting up and squeezing Kurt’s hands.

“Yeah.” 

Blaine gives Kurt that blinding grin, the one that Kurt worried he’d never get to cause again, before wrapping Kurt tightly in his arms. Kurt expected to be kissed, but he realizes he actually sort of likes this more. He needs to feel Blaine hold him, not crush him but surround him. He still doubts Blaine is telling the whole truth about how he feels, but he’s glad he doesn’t have to worry anymore about hiding what Blaine feels pressed against his chest. He tucks his face against Blaine’s neck and breathes in Blaine’s smell. He feels wonderfully at home in Blaine’s arms and he just has to hope it lasts.


End file.
